Mail

by Mameve Medwed

  “Those look crisp,” I point out.

  “It’s a combination of bleach and detergent. And grabbing them from the dryer before the wrinkles can set.” She stops. “So how are you?” she asks. She’s not about to discuss undershorts with somebody who might be sensitive about not having her own basket’s worth of hundred percent cotton, colorfast men’s mediums.

  “Managing.”

  “Jake must help.”

  “Yes. And no. It’s not quite the same as substituting mustard for mayonnaise and being equally content.”

  “If that’s your analogy. But I might pick something else. More like champagne and beer.”

  “I could have guessed.”

  “I can’t say I like your tone,” she objects, then catches herself. I watch her smooth out her features, make allowances for the suffering of her child. “No word from the mailman?” She is trying not to look hopeful.

  “Words, yes, on the machine, but no sighting.”

  “That’s a start,” she says in her you-can’t-expect-everything voice which nevertheless expects everything. “Though I always believe absolute cold turkey is the way to go in affairs of the heart.”

  “Is that what happened to you. With the Sears man?”

  “Yes. I think it was much too painful for him to see me ever again. I was grateful in the end. If he hadn’t broken it off, and so cleanly, I wouldn’t have become a Graham.” She snaps the elastic on a pair of blue Oxford cloth shorts for emphasis. She brightens. “And I wouldn’t be becoming a Haven.”

  The way she says it, it sounds as if Graham is one of the lower stations of the cross on the way to Haven.

  In a fury I empty my basket into the nearest machine, stuffing together my black socks with my white bras, my navy turtlenecks with my khaki pants.

  “Katinka,” my mother points out, “you are mixing up your blacks and whites!”

  I ignore her. So what if everything turns gray. It will suit my mood plus save time trying to coordinate.

  My mother sighs. “Your underwear will turn gray,” she states. Her voice sounds resigned to the fact that her daughter’s limp dingy bras will never induce pheromones in a gentleman’s crisp red-striped undershorts.

  “So, you’re changing your name? You’re becoming a Haven?” I accuse.

  “Naturally.”

  “Well, isn’t that funny because I’m changing my name, too.”

  My mother claps her hands. She executes a pirouette on the cement floor. I know she’s thinking to Barnes just as I say, “Back to Graham.”

  “Graham?” she ponders as if it’s a word she’s never heard before.

  “It is my name. It is your name,” I point out.

  “But what about O’Toole?” she asks. “Seamus is so well known.” This from the mother of a daughter whom Seamus left for the M&M’s, whom he humiliated, condescended to, from whom he tried to steal back his class. Talk about Benedict Arnolds! Talk about motherly love and loyalty!

  I empty half a box of Tide into the machine and slam down the lid. I press a bunch of buttons, not paying any attention to which one is what. I can’t look at my mother. My so-called mother. I turn my attention to the bulletin board across the room: A marmalade kitten has run away. The couple in 7C have a StairMaster to sell. There are instructions about recycling. About storing bicycles. “Warning,” one notice proclaims in black letters outlined in red: “All tenants should take extreme caution against allowing access to unwanted visitors.” I should have read this earlier. In comes my mother and there goes my neighborhood.

  My mother continues as if my back isn’t turned, as if my back isn’t rigid with anger. “O’Toole’s been your name for so long.”

  “I could say the same about you and Graham.”

  “I know, dear. But I’m making changes, being open to new things.”

  “So am I.”

  “But you’re going back to the old.” She pauses. “Of course, it is a problem in Boston, in Cambridge, always having to make the distinction between the Boston O’Tooles and the Dublin O’Tooles.”

  I press my lips together. Maybe I’ll buy the StairMaster for my mother so she can get in shape for climbing the stairway to Haven.

  “Graham is better than some,” she sighs. It’s a bigger-than-a-breadbox kind of statement—not better than Barnes or O’Toole, but better than …

  “Better than what?” I ask. I turn around to face her.

  “Than … What was that mailman’s name?”

  “That mailman’s name, as you well know, is Cappetti. Louie Cappetti.”

  “Thank God for small favors,” my mother says.

  “Snob,” I yell. “No wonder the Sears man dumped you. You are a terrible snob. Snob. Snob. Snob!”The words bubble out of me like the rabid froth of a raging maniac. To the accompaniment, I soon discover, of clouds of soap bubbles which are oozing up from under the lid of the washing machine. The bubbles pour over the side to frost a landscape of hills and dales across the floor. Within seconds, the washing machine starts to shake, rattle, and roll. None of these amazing phenomena distract my mother, who stands frozen to the floor, her mouth open, her eyes bright with tears. Then she turns on her heels and stomps upstairs, abandoning me, the belching, dancing washing machine, and three neat rows of Professor Arthur T. Haven’s underpants.

  The next morning, I go to Milly’s and get the Dumpmobile. I pack my bag. I write a note for the super’s box. I broke the machine, I confess, please send me the bill for repairs. I scribble a curt message for my mother: Am going to Maine. Will call when I get back. I should add a postscript of apology. I don’t. The Maytag man can fix the broken washing machine. I can try to fix my broken romance with Louis. But who in hell can repair this mother-daughter relationship?

  * * *

  I ride the Dumpmobile like a cowboy on a rodeo bull. I race out of Boston and across the New Hampshire turnpike. I am so far over the speed limit that the dials for the radio fall out. I’m fed up, fed up with my mother, with Seamus, with Cambridge, with Harvard and all it implies, with Boston and its distinctions between the Boston and Dublin O’Tooles, with an apartment building where you can run into just anybody in the basement laundry room. The faster I drive the faster I am putting all this behind me. A car coming in the opposite direction beams its lights. A speed trap? This doesn’t slow me down. What’s a mere ticket when I’m already resigned to being wrapped around a tree. I imagine my funeral. My mother, the newly minted Mrs. Haven, will have a hard time deciding what to wear. Seamus will toot his act of generosity: he gave me his class, thus initiating in me a final flame of self-esteem before its all too early extinguishing. Daniella will talk (okay—so it’s fantasy) about how well I mothered her. Barney Souza will say what a faithful customer I was, how I never tried to chisel into line or seek out the discount chains. Max will say I told good jokes. Betty Jean Williamson, my editor, will mourn a great writer cut down in her semi-youth. My tires spin. My thoughts fly. How did Lady Chatterley end up? I wonder. In An American Tragedy, Roberta was pushed out of a boat. I am being pushed to the edge. At my funeral, Louie will be sad. And Jake. Milly will really sob. I start to sob. Then catch myself. If I slow down maybe I won’t be measured for a coffin just yet. I lift my foot from the gas pedal. My spirits lift. And by the time I am halfway across the Portsmouth bridge and see the sign: Welcome to Maine, Vacationland, I am heading for home.

  I arrive at Old Town in the early afternoon. I am ravenous. I’d like to say it’s because of Maine’s pure air, the scent of pines, cleansing breezes coming off the sea. But the truth is, Old Town and what surrounds it—Bangor, Brewer, Veazie, Orono (which at least has the university), Stillwater—are the camping grounds of paper mills and shoe factories, grim towns with boarded-up centers, more gas stations than comfort stations, and, circling their outskirts, rings of going-out-of-business malls. “Oh, you come from Maine!” my college friends would clap their hands, and extol the glories of rocky coast, of surf, of idyllic weeks at summer camp, of
forests not yet deforested. “Maine is lovely this time of year,” my mother might say though lovely is not the adjective she’d pick for Old Town, for her town.

  But it’s the one I pick for my town—if lovely is an adjective used freely for what is loved and not what is beautiful. I drive down Main Street, past the Old Town Canoe Factory, past shabby buildings and deserted stores. Clumps of snow are banked against the curbs. A man in a cap and the plaid coat of a lumberjack gets out of a pickup truck. This Maine-iac climbed Mount Katahdin is stuck on the bumper. Old Town is a lovely city, I decide, a city without pretense, without snobbery.

  I go down Water Street. At the crossing there’s a handmade notice broadcasting bingo on Monday nights, another promoting a church supper featuring Mabel Corcoran’s homemade pies. Two feet from these, there’s a more official sign, hexagonal, announcing Deaf Child. I slow down. I study it. I make a right onto Chester, drive past the McClellens, the Boudreaus, the Richardsons, and pull up in front of number 58. I look at my house. My heart gives a thump. I recognize that thump, it’s a close relative to the one I had when I first saw Louie over the tops of trays with flowered food and across a crowded room.

  The house is small, clapboard, painted white with green shutters and red trim. There’s a wide front porch and a narrow garden in the back. From the dormer window you can see a slice of the Penobscot River. It’s modest, sweet, not a house you’d think of as having the potential to be part of a hotshot renewal scheme. But it’s not a house that looks deserted either, abandoned by my mother, left to my father’s ghost. When I get out of the car, I see a ladder propped at the side and hear someone hammering on the roof. “Hello! Hello!” I yell.

  The hammering stops. A face peers out just where the roof peaks.

  “It’s Katinka. Katinka,” I hesitate. “Graham,” I add.

  “Well, I’ll be,” somebody yells. “Hold your horses.”

  A man skips down the ladder lithe as a monkey even though he’s wearing a heavy coat, boots, cap, and, I notice as he comes nearer, thick gloves.

  One of which he removes. He holds out his hand. “Frenchy Levesque. Why the last time I saw you was at your high school graduation. You were valedictorian.”

  “Salutatorian, really. Jesse Cornman, the first in our class, had a speech impediment.”

  He laughs. His lips are chapped. His face is weatherbeaten, with a natty gray mustache, and eyes bright as black jet beads. “I still remember that speech. About the importance of roots.”

  I am amazed. Until this minute I had forgotten it. Had I chosen that topic or had the drama teacher, whose polished product— me—was going to be credited to her manufacture, suggested it? I cast my mind back. It was a generic speech. I remember the end: “In conclusion, faculty, parents, friends, fellow students, even though after commencement we will all be branching out in separate ways, blossoming and ripening on individual and often distant vines, we have in common our roots, sunk deep and strong into this soil we call home.” I cringe.

  “So how long are you planning to be here?” Frenchy asks now.

  “Just a night.”

  “Too bad,” he says. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to stay in the house?”

  To stay in the house never occurred to me. “I thought a motel.”

  “And pay those prices? For that cardboard construction?”

  “Well …”

  “The house is fine. With spring coming, the melting snow, I’m making sure the roof is watertight. I’ve got the key.”

  And I’ve got a key, too, I realize all at once. It’s on my key chain among the keys to my apartment, the basement door, the storage bin, the mailbox, and a molted rabbit’s foot. “I’d love that,” I say. “But I thought the house was about to be sold, or already has been, to a developer.”

  Frenchy grins. “That was no developer. That was my son.” His face turns serious. “A fool-brained scheme. Naturally fell through. The kid’s always looking for something better, never content with what he has. Now he’s got some ridiculous idea about making his fortune down in Florida. Damn silly state if you ask me. Anyway. Kids have to go. Branch out. Make their mistakes. He’ll soon be home.”

  “So the house is still for sale?”

  He nods. “And your mother’s lowered the price. She seems awfully eager to get rid of it.” He pauses. “You’ve got your mother in you. And a bit of your dad. How are things up in Cambridge?”

  “Fine,” I say. “The usual.”

  “I spent some time there myself,” he says. “Didn’t like it much.”

  I tell Frenchy I’ll return later. I have things to do. He gives me the name of the real estate agent. I ask what’s the best bank in town for mortgages. He checks his watch. The bank’s closed, he explains, but I can call Tubby Burnside at home. Everybody does. He hands me his key just in case mine’s rusted out and doesn’t work. He’ll get the roof finished before night. It’ll all come back to me, he says, how cozy it is, what a nice house.

  I call Tubby Burnside at home. “Katinka, old buddy!” he exclaims. He was a year behind me in school. A fat kid who wore his jeans pulled too high and was the president and only member of the Old Town High investment club. I explain my plan. “Have you eaten yet?” Tubby Burnside asks.

  “No, and I’m starved.”

  “Me, too,” says Tubby with enormous sympathy. “Let me get hold of Marge Gilmore—was Marge Goodreau—the real estate agent, and we’ll meet you at Auntie Vi’s in half an hour.”

  Tubby and Marge are already sitting in a booth at Auntie Vi’s Family Restaurant when I arrive. In front of Tubby quivers a tower of ruby Jell-O studded with marshmallows on a leaf of iceberg lettuce. Marge is dipping a spoon into a fruit cocktail piled onto a scoop of lime green sherbet. I slide in next to Marge since there’s more room on her side. They beam at me. Tubby’s in a plaid flannel shirt and jeans which, these days, are slung low enough for his belly to hang over. Marge, who was head cheerleader and known as Goody-Goody Goodreau, is in jeans and an Irish sweater. Her hair’s pulled back in a ponytail. She looks just the way she did when we made a pineapple upside-down cake together in home ec. I think of city real estate agents in their padded-shoulder power suits. And of bankers, for that matter, in their pinstripes. Of course it’s Saturday. Still, Marge and Tubby could be anyone: rich man, poor man, beggerman, mailman. I remember my mother told me that Tubby had gone on to Wharton after the U of M. That he had been a prodigy. In Old Town, people surprise you.

  Which holds for our waitress, who turns out to be Pollyanne Mulligan, my best friend from the neighborhood. “I’d know you anywhere,” Pollyanne says.

  “You, too,” I lie.

  The truth is she has the severe face and no-nonsense mousy brown braid of a professor of women’s studies whose class I once audited. At the end of eighth grade she went on to John Bapst in Bangor, and we lost touch. Who knows how parochial school changed her. I’d have never recognized this serious person as my devilish friend. Except maybe for the cross dangling over the top of her striped apron. “She once was a nun,” Marge whispers, implying that in Old Town waitress can be substituted for nun as easily as green beans for broccoli.

  Over submarine sandwiches layered with sweet pickles, I explain to Marge and Tubby that I want to buy my house. I pull out the small looseleaf notebook I always cart around for jotting story ideas in. I’ve filled one section with all the necessary information. The money my father left me, my stocks, my savings. Marge and Tubby take out their own notebooks, their own pens. They do their own arithmetic. For a moment the only sound is the crunch of pickles and the scratching of writing implements. “We can just about do it,” Tubby says.

  “I second that,” Marge agrees.

  “I’ll send you a mortgage application,” Tubby says.

  “I’ll get to work on the Purchase and Sale Agreement,” Marge adds.

  Tubby nods. “Things move fast in Old Town. We can probably have you in your old front yard for the Memorial Day parade.”
/>   Tubby orders another submarine sandwich. He offers me half. I’m tempted, but I have to go, I say. We shake hands all around. Pollyanne Mulligan refills Marge’s coffee cup. “Katinka’s moving back,” Marge tells her.

  Pollyanne Mulligan smiles, it’s a beatific smile, but then she was once married to God, and now lives with Jesus. She fingers her cross. “Alone?” she asks.

  “We’ll see,” I say.

  There’s no line at the Town Hall even though all the notices make a point of their Saturday hours to accommodate working parents and busy citizens. My birth certificate with raised seal is produced with high-tech efficiency without high tech by a clerk named—I see from her tag—Glory who had been doing geometry problems in a composition book. I write out my check. At ten dollars, it’s a bargain. But then my lunch was only $3.29.

  As I am leaving I notice a table under an Information sign. I pick up a sheaf of brochures. One section is labeled “Our Public Schools.” I study a leaflet called “Mainstreaming,” subtitled “Special Education for Children with Disabilities.” Paid for by Your Tax Dollars is written in bold letters at the end.

  I drive around for the rest of the afternoon. I drive down old familiar streets. I drive to Orono, and across the campus of the university. Students stroll the paths or stand in clusters under trees. The campus is large, open, with rolling grounds and vast distances between buildings. I cross the bridge to Indian Island and explore the reservation. In Big Chief Thunder’s Trading Post, I purchase a feathered headdress and a peace pipe for Max from a woman with lots of turquoise jewelry and few teeth. I could teach writing here, I think. There would be a need. And at the university.

  On the way home, I buy a steamed lobster from a shack which advertises they sell them “live and kicking all year long.” I stop at the liquor store for a six-pack of beer. I make a wrong turn. A oneway has been reversed. What used to be a shortcut to Birch Avenue is now a dead end. Another street has been paved over for a skating rink. When I see the Deaf Child sign, however, I know exactly where I am.